It’s the rare individual who actually looks forward to getting jabbed with a needle, even if what’s in the needle can protect them from a serious disease such as COVID-19.

But several teams around the world are working on a way to inject a vaccine without the ouch. The trick is to make the needles small. Really small. So small they don’t interact with the nerve endings that signal pain.

Mark Prausnitz is director of the Center for Drug Design, Development and Delivery at Georgia Tech. He works on something called microneedle patches to deliver vaccines. So far, he’s developed patch vaccines for flu and measles, but the technology could be used for a COVID-19 vaccine as well.